“Shakespeare’s plays are organized in the First Folio into three now familiar genre categories: Comedies, Tragedies, and Histories. Later scholars added a fourth, describing certain late plays like The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale that contain elements of both comedy and tragedy, along with fantastical features like magic, as ‘romance plays’. In organizing the 403 plays that make up the Folger’s Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama, we needed a few more than those four categories. By grouping our plays by genre, we aim to classify our dramatic material in ways that make it easy for scholars and readers to compare plays that were generally alike—comparing tragedy to tragedy, so to speak, using as few broadly applicable genres as possible.”

“An online publication that defines the characteristics, scope, and uses of controlled vocabularies for art and cultural materials, and explains how vocabularies should be integrated in cataloging systems and utilized for indexing and retrieval.”